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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23120437">the heart is a weapon</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abbie/pseuds/Abbie'>Abbie</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>a love like gravity [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Arrow (TV 2012)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Getting to Know Each Other, Past Child Abuse, Reluctant Soulmates, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Touch-Starved, Touching</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 01:01:59</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,187</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23120437</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abbie/pseuds/Abbie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Tommy and Felicity explore each other—skin, scars, and stories.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Tommy Merlyn &amp; Felicity Smoak, Tommy Merlyn/Felicity Smoak</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>a love like gravity [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1661899</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>63</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>the heart is a weapon</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princess_Sarcastia/gifts">Princess_Sarcastia</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Princess_Sarcastia prompted the word "weapon" for this AU, so of course I wrote five pages of these idiots being soft and handsy before getting anywhere <i>near</i> that. Please enjoy this self-indulgent mess of whatever.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Felicity sat on Tommy’s couch, plush and soft and oh-so-expensive, in his magnificently appointed high rise condo, and she couldn’t keep her hands off him.</p><p>Of course, it was mutual, really.</p><p>They were almost a week into settling and the raw <em>need</em> to touch him gnawed at Felicity’s nerve endings most hours of the day. She could scarcely imagine how they were going to survive the next three to eight weeks.</p><p>They were seated in the middle of the couch, deep in the night, the only lights on soft, ambient globes inset into the ceiling, creating an intimate bubble around them that only made it easier to forget they weren’t the only two people in the world. They were so close they shared a seat cushion, each with a knee pulled up and folded on the couch, their knees and shins aligning, parallel, fit together like puzzle pieces. They had fallen silent some time ago, maybe fifteen minutes, maybe two hours.</p><p>It got hard to keep track sometimes.</p><p>Time slowed, pulled, thick and stretched like warm taffy. They were, in that bubble, only their breathing, only the catch of his skin on hers as his fingers traced up the inside of her wrist, pressed lightly at the softness of her inner elbow, reduced to a ghosting of fingertips to raise the little hairs over her upper arm, to her shoulder, his thumb settling over the strap of her floral tanktop, shifting to map the shelf of her collarbone.</p><p>Felicity tilted her head to let his hand glide up her neck, shifting her hair, her eyes on her own fingers mapping the lines and creases of his empty palm, his knuckles resting against her bare knee. She pressed her thumb along the thin, raised bones of his wrist, swirled the touch down to follow the blue veins like a secret hidden under the surface of his skin.</p><p>The fingers of Tommy’s left hand curled in the hair behind her ear, his thumb grazing lightly from her temple, around the frame of her glasses, back to follow the lower curve of her cheekbone. From there his thumb swept down by the corner of her mouth, and Felicity raised her eyes to his, pulling at the hand on her knee to thread her fingers tightly with his.</p><p>He stared at her in a way she could only describe as <em>heavy</em>, eyelids hooded with a weight that echoed in her own chest, pressed at her bones. It wasn’t crushing, or painful. It set her firmly in her own skin, so every faint touch lit up along her nerve endings like the city lights beyond the condo’s floor-to-ceiling window. </p><p>That weight draped between them, tethering, pulling. They held each other’s gaze as Tommy’s thumb circled her chin, pressing just beneath her lower lip. Absurdly, it made her smile, and he echoed it, slow and crooked and always somehow surprised.</p><p>As nervous as it made her, as wary as she tried to stay, times like this she found herself absolutely drunk on him. It was a feeling of fullness in the pit of her stomach, giddy and bubbling in her chest. It would be so much more mortifying if it were any less obvious that he felt exactly the same.</p><p>Still smiling, smaller, almost as if his lips had forgotten to stop, Tommy’s eyes moved with his hand, the backs of his knuckles edging along her jawline, sliding down her throat. His palm pressed against her chest just below the hollow of her throat and she watched him swallow, nervous. She bit her lip and knew exactly what made him hesitate.</p><p>Taking a deep breath, Felicity squeezed his hand to draw his eyes back to hers and gave him a nod. Reading just <em>how</em> uncertain he was in the way his eyes flickered back and forth between hers, she chanced breaking the comforting lull of their silence. Even so, her voice was little more than a whisper. “You can.”</p><p>He exhaled shakily, his eyes dropping back to his hand on her chest. Pulling his bottom lip between his teeth, he curled all but one finger into his palm, trailing his index finger slowly, so slowly down the center of her chest, to where the top of her mark peeked above the low V of her neckline.</p><p>When he touched it, it was like breathing electricity. They both gasped at the muted echo of their initial bonding, all live current and humming, buzzing awareness. The pad of Tommy’s finger stroked over the mark and Felicity let her eyes slide shut. It was somehow too much to look at him and feel that circling, steady pressure over her bondmark. It was as if all sensation in her body had narrowed and concentrated down to that point of contact.</p><p>It was like nothing else Felicity had ever experienced.</p><p>It happened like this, sometimes. An intensifying, absorbing fascination with each other’s mark, needing to see it, to touch it, to verify it as real and just take in those impossible lines. It was electric, but soothing, sending out a ripple of comfort she could feel in her soul, if she were leaning towards the poetic. Like everything else, the compulsion over their marks ebbed and flowed, and from the moment Tommy touched hers, his finger dipping just under her neckline to trace it in full in the center of her sternum, she could feel it rising in her like an answer.</p><p>She had all but forgotten she was still holding his right hand, fingers entwined, even as her thumb swept rhythmically along the outside of his. Opening her eyes, she squeezed his fingers, again using the pressure to make him look at her.</p><p>His eyes all but dragged from the stroke of his finger against her skin, and still he didn’t even pause the motion.</p><p>“Tommy,” she started, biting her lip. Heat flushed into her cheeks, embarrassed to put the escalating need she felt into words. “Can I…”</p><p>She wrinkled her nose, lips tucking around the words she was so reluctant to let so clunkily, awkwardly frame what she was asking.</p><p>But if there was a benefit to being bonded, it was that words were often almost ornamental.</p><p>Understanding lit in Tommy’s eyes with a blink, and he pulled his hand from her chest like it was nothing, even as the cessation of that touch felt to her like tearing velcro. “Yes. Yeah, of course.”</p><p>He shifted on the cushion as if he would move closer to her, but there was no real gap between them they could fill without climbing into each other’s laps. And neither of them, in this moment, were quite ready to surrender that far, despite everything else. They’d only known each other a handful of <em>days</em>, after all.</p><p>Felicity bit her lip to swallow a laugh at that thought as Tommy nimbly undid the first several buttons of his shirt one-handed, tugging at the left side to offer her access to skin that anyone would consider intimate. But the humorous imbalance of their situation fell away from her mind the moment her eyes fell on his exposed mark.</p><p>It matched hers, perfect in every line and loop and curve. It resonated in her head, in her heart, like something memorized and beloved, even as she would never have been able to put it down in ink and paper so anyone else might see what she saw. It was hers, and his. Theirs. Exact and reflected, something so complex her mind couldn’t properly hold it, yet so simple she’d know it just from its edge.</p><p>The sudden urge to lean forward and press her lips to his mark tugged like a hook behind her navel. Eyelashes flickering, breath coming in low and sharp, she resisted it, satisfied enough to raise her right hand and graze her fingertips across where it was stamped on his left pectoral, directly over his heart. The dark thatch of his chest hair couldn’t obscure it, and she flushed to realize as she stroked the mark she was all but petting him.</p><p>“Sorry,” she murmured, nose crinkling again self consciously.</p><p>He laughed, soft and low. “For what?”</p><p>“Um. Petting you?” she ventured, shoulders hunching up.</p><p>He laughed again, louder, warmer. Eyes twinkling, he ducked his chin to catch her gaze, humor in the curve of his mouth. “It’s not your fault I’m furry.” </p><p>She snorted and rolled her eyes, but in the act her attention snagged and caught on a pale, thick line of scar tissue just under the notch of his breastbone. It was shiny and smooth looking, certainly years old, but it wasn’t small. Brows pulling together in a frown, Felicity let her hand slide from Tommy’s bondmark down, setting her palm high against his stomach, framing the scar with the angle of her thumb and fingers.</p><p>Tommy’s soft inhale mirrored the jump of muscles under her touch and she looked up at his face, frown vanishing in surprise at the expression she found there.</p><p>Tommy looked… startled. Vulnerable. Eyes widened and brows pulling up at the inside as he stared down at her hand on his stomach. His left hand clutched suddenly at her elbow, but it was the right extricating from Felicity’s that made her worry she had crossed a line.</p><p>However, the fingers of his right hand only circled her wrist, loose and trembling. He didn’t pull her hand away from the scar or lean away from her. The wide-eyed shock gave way to something almost… resigned, tinged with an old, banked bitterness.</p><p>“Tommy?” Felicity pressed her hand more firmly against his skin so he’d meet her eyes. “I… what happened? Or,” she sucked in a hard breath, nerves erupting in her stomach like a flock of birds, “or should I…? You don’t have to tell me. I can, I can never touch it again.”</p><p>“It’s okay,” he countered in a hush, the fingertips on her wrist setting to an idle stroking. She suspected he didn’t even know he was doing it, just comforting himself with her skin.</p><p>She shook her head, not an argument, exactly. “You don’t owe me anything.”</p><p>“No,” he agreed, letting the word pull from his lips and stretch. “But I don’t think it’s about <em>owe</em>. You can ask. I’ll tell you.”</p><p>The nervous fluttering moved to Felicity’s chest, but she nodded, dropping her eyes again to that scar. It looked serious. Like it had hurt.</p><p>An instinct curled in the back of her mind, and she looked into Tommy’s face again. “Did someone do this to you?”</p><p>He pushed air out of his nose in something like a laugh, or like the photo negative of one, his lips pulling up at one side and his head tilting opposite. He did tug her hand from his stomach this time, but only so he could bring it to his cheek, pressing her fingers there with his own.</p><p>It <em>was</em> comfort, she knew. A counterbalance to whatever landmine she had danced them over.</p><p>“I forget sometimes that you didn’t live here five years ago,” he murmured, turning his head enough that he spoke the words into her palm. He let his eyes close and breathed against her skin, eyebrows knotting in an echo of pain. “My dad did this.”</p><p>It was little more than a breath, the words themselves almost flattened under the depth of his sadness and shame.</p><p>Felicity’s eyes widened, her lips parting in disbelief. Of course she’d known what Malcolm Merlyn had done, that he was as clear cut a monster as humanity could make. Even without having lived in Starling at the time, Malcolm’s attempted class genocide was a national media spectacle, his trial a macabre circus. Felicity had paid as much attention to it all as the average American; meaning, she was aware of the broad sketch of it all, at the shock of such a horror so barely averted.</p><p>But there was something so much more terribly intimate and grotesque in a father doing something like this to his own son.</p><p>Tommy continued, like he needed to tell the whole story. He spoke it against her pulse, cradling her hand in his as she pushed her fingers into the hair at his temple. “It was the last day of the trial. Dad was under house arrest, because even when you’re almost successful at intentionally murdering thousands just because they’re poor, wealth buys you a lot of leeway in the justice system. I still… I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around who my dad really was. <em>What</em> he was. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he was always a bastard, and a truly shitty father. But I was never less than a disappointment as a son, and I just… I never saw it. Never.”</p><p>“He was your dad,” Felicity said quietly. “That distorts everything.”</p><p>Tommy opened his eyes again and found hers, held them steady. He nuzzled his cheek into her palm. “I guess you’re right. I’m not sure I’ll ever really forgive myself for it anyways, though. It shouldn’t have been a major intuitive leap. The guy who dumps his kid on a hired nanny days after his mom dies and is barely seen again for the next couple years isn’t a far slide from the guy who hates poor people so much he tries to blow up an entire district of them.<b></b>”</p><p>Felicity made a face at him, skeptical and dry. “Abusive dads are unfortunately a dime a dozen. Genocidal murderers? Not so much.”</p><p>He laughed like she’d surprised it out of him. “Yeah, I guess.” He sighed and didn’t resist when she slipped her hand from under his, but only to stroke his hair away from his face. He dropped his now-empty hand to her knee, curving his fingers around the joint like she would anchor him through what he said next. “I went there that day to try and… I don’t know, reason with him. I don’t know why I thought he’d give a damn. I just had to at least try.”</p><p>Not even really thinking about it, Felicity took the hand not on her knee in her free hand and pulled it to her chest, over her own mark again. Just as thoughtlessly, Tommy’s fingers tucked into the dip of her neckline, the backs brushing the mark. She held his hand there as he stared somewhere distant beyond her shoulder.</p><p>The pull of his lips was wry and self-critical. “Guess I’d disappointed Dad again by cooperating with the prosecution. Some of what happened then is a bit of a blur, but I remember him being just, just <em>really</em> angry about something I’d said on the witness stand. And, you know, the cops had swept the place for weapons before he was authorized for house arrest, but I can see why they missed that damn dagger. It looked like some ridiculous decorative piece, the kind of kitschy bullshit you buy in places that sell incense and comic books and weird porn mags from the eighties.”</p><p>His brows lifted and he inhaled unsteadily, eyes still lost to memory even as his fingers tugged at her top, pulling the neckline down to give him more access to her mark. “I can verify, however, that it was an entirely functional weapon. Very sharp. Hurt like a bitch going in, worse coming out.”</p><p>Felicity’s throat closed, stricken at the visceral sense memory his words recalled. It hadn’t happened to her, but she <em>felt</em> it; the searing intrusion of the blade, the impact of the hilt against her ribs. The tearing yank of it being pulled out, and all that hot blood. She shuddered as the echo-pain dissipated and pressed Tommy’s hand more firmly to her chest, desperate to feel <em>here</em> and <em>now</em>. To replace that shocking agony with the rightness and warmth of his fingers against her mark. She dropped the hand on Tommy’s face to rest over his mark, too, and sighed with the relief of a connection completed.</p><p>Tommy squeezed her knee, swallowing thickly. His voice came out with a rasp as he said, “I don’t think he missed my heart on purpose. I’m pretty sure he figured if he was damned anyways he’d at least get the satisfaction of killing me. I spent almost three weeks in the hospital from the bloodloss and the surgery. Internal damage. Physical therapy after that. Completely missed the sentencing. Saw it on the news with everybody else. When he died in the prison riot, too.”</p><p>She bit her lip against the reflexive urge to apologize for his loss. His father had tried to kill him. Nearly succeeded. Even if Tommy had still grieved him, Felicity couldn’t find it in herself to be sorry Malcolm could never hurt him or anyone else again.</p><p>He blinked rapidly, seeming to finally come back to himself and out of the past. Clearing his throat, he ducked his head with another wry smile. “So. That’s what happened. Not exactly a ‘cool scar’ story.”</p><p>“Thank you,” Felicity said, shrugging with one corner of her mouth when he looked at her quizzically. “For telling me. Trusting me with that.”</p><p>His eyebrows twitched in a revealing microepxression, fear and vulnerability and something like hope, but it was gone in an instant. He laughed hoarsely, though his expression looked more like a frown than anything else. “Well, we’re bond partners. If I can’t… if I can’t trust <em>you</em> with that, then I can’t trust anybody.”</p><p>He sounded like he only <em>wanted</em> to believe that. Thinking of her parents, of her father’s taillights disappearing around the street corner, Felicity couldn’t blame him, even as she blamed herself for wanting to believe it, too.</p><p>Tommy heaved a great sigh and straightened his back, removing the hand from her knee—and seeming to suddenly realize his other hand was halfway down the front of her top. </p><p>His eyes blew wide and his cheeks went red, making Felicity frown and look down. Comically, she did a doubletake, at first seeing nothing worth that look of shock before realizing—<em>his hand was halfway down the front of her top</em>.</p><p>“Uh,” Tommy started, stammering, “um, wow, so, ummm.”</p><p>He tugged at his hand, but only a little, and not enough to break the resistance of Felicity’s grip.</p><p>Felicity steeled her spine against the heat she could feel in her own face, raising her chin and looking at Tommy with all the calm and determination she could muster as she held his hand exactly where it was. “We’d better get used to it, right? We’ve got weeks of this ahead of us.” As if to remind him this was a bilaterally mortifying ordeal, she rubbed her hand firmly against his chest, over his mark. “We’re bond partners. If we can’t trust each other with this…”</p><p>She trailed off, feeling like they were handling a double-edged weapon far sharper than any dagger.</p><p>He swallowed hard, but answered the stubborn angle of her jaw with a straightening of his shoulders—and another soft stroke against her mark. “Then we can’t trust anyone.”</p>
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